Everything takes time to sink in. As your buyer travels down their buying journey, there are multiple points where things just have to sink in before they can proceed. Efforts to rush your buyer through these natural pause points will be like trying to run through an ever widening pond of quick sand. You may be expending great efforts in the delivery of marketing content, but if you are not addressing the context of why things are stuck, things will remain stuck. And so, as you develop your demand generation model and processes, you must seek to identify the buyer’s pause points. Your goal is to completely pull them out of that quick sand, as opposed to trying to run through it.
While recently reading the biography of Albert Einstein, I came across an illustrative example. Einstein was really stuck with an inability to accept the basis of quantum mechanics. It was 1927 and a little over 10 years after Einstein had derived the theory of general relativity, and he had already received the Nobel prize. Given that he was a genius with extraordinary reasoning skills, you would not expect that he could be stuck in the quick stand. As the story goes, the underlying principle of quantum mechanics was the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That certain movements at the atomic level were best described by chance. Neils Bohr (also a Nobel prize winner) continually worked to prove the principle to Einstein. But with each proof, Einstein could not be appeased, and raised a different and well-constructed scientific objection. In the end, Einstein declared that God simply would not play with dice. To which Bohr responded, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do!”* And there you have it. Einstein would not truly accept the proof, would not get out of the quick sand, because he had an underlying assumption that finally surfaced. He just didn’t think that nature was meant to be this way.
And so it is with every buyer’s journey. There are some innate assumptions that must be uncovered before you can free them from the quicksand and allow them to move ahead. Even though appropriate marketing content may be provided as proof of the way forward, the movement won’t happen until the buyer’s underlying assumptions are dealt with. The time for things to sink in will vary, but it is necessary for the buyer to release false beliefs or assumptions that are causing the stall. Since we are dealing with human nature, figuring this out will be a process of heuristics. You have to start somewhere with your demand generation model, but as more buyers pass through, you must seek to understand and characterize where things are getting stuck and why. And then attempt to uncover and address different possible obstacles, through the right content.
If on the other hand, you choose to push harder through the quicksand, you may end up with a buyer who ends up as a customer, but not the customer you wanted. They will be unhappy. They may feel duped into buying your solution. They may want to return the product or back out of the deal. They may not be committed to your solution, even though they own it. Or they may just have bad things to say about it all, to anyone who will listen. Just to cite a recent high profile example, The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about Avon’s failed implementation of SAP’s ERP system and its $125M write-off. (Avon to Halt Rollout of New Order Management System).
So there you have it, developing a marketing model for your demand generation will require you to have expectations that the model will need to evolve in an learning manner. Gather your feedback from the data analytics of what is really happening, and see what will get buyers unstuck. Don’t just rush them through, only to end up with unhappy customers at the end of the process.